Read Learning by Heart for Free Online Page B

I knew not what of wild and sweet: Tennyson.
    Come to the window, sweet is the night air! That week Bisley had made her read Matthew Arnold for a whole day. She felt she was being invaded by the lines, by their insistence. Sometimes she loathed their intensity. Sometimes – especially lately – she found them murmuring to her when she did not want to hear them. Matthew Arnold – oh, God, she hated that name! Bisley went on about him, like a dog growling over a toy.
    ‘Do you know what he was, Cora?’ he had asked. ‘An educationalist. He wanted the spread of culture. Of culture, Cora!’ He had lowered his face almost to hers, grinning. ‘People like you, Cora. Ignoramuses like you.’
    It was a joke. She knew that. But she couldn’t get the wretched voice out of her mind. Come to the window, sweet is the night air …
    ‘Do you know what he wanted most of all, Cora? “Something to snatch from dull oblivion”. That’s what he wanted.’ And Bisley had prodded the open page. ‘“From dull oblivion”. You know what he called men? Do you know how he described their lives? “Striving blindly, achieving nothing … no one asks who or what they have been.”’ And he smiled at her, as if she were part of the human race that would vanish into nothing, having run about blindly all her life.
    She glanced at her father. Was he one of Arnold and Bisley’s blind men, she wondered. Was that how they would describe him? Her father saw her look and winked at her. Well, she thought, suddenly passionate, they were wrong. This flood of self-conscious feeling was wrong. The world turned on small, quiet loyalties and understandings. No one ever cured anything by standing on a mountaintop declaring their misery. She smiled back at her father, deliberately pushing away the thought of Bisley’s poets; the hymn, of which she hadn’t sung a word, came to an end.
    After the service, out in the sun, the Abbey Green was packed. The colours of the summer clothes were almost too bright after the gloom inside.
    As they stood in the sunlight, her mother touched her arm. ‘That’s the man I told you about,’ she whispered, and pointed to a figure coming across the green.
    When Cora had got home the night before, her parents had been recounting a story of how a stranger had come to their door and said he was buying the derelict buildings in the fields at the top of Marchbank Row, a lane that ran parallel with the back of their long garden, and the fringe of trees at the bottom.
    Marchbank Row was the narrowest of lanes, unsurfaced, and was rapidly deteriorating; hundreds of years ago it had formed a packhorse track that ran for miles above the valley, all the way from Petherton to Shaftesbury; now, other farms and properties had encroached on it and obliterated it in places, and it was only for a few hundred yards here and there that it remained, a narrow, muddy echo of its past.
    ‘We told him we were glad someone was taking them on,’ her mother had continued, referring to the broken-down buildings on the other side of Marchbank Row, behind the vastly overgrown hawthorn hedges. Since the previous owner had died, an old man in his nineties, the fields had run almost to ruin, thick with nettles and ragwort. ‘But you’ll never believe the most peculiar thing,’ her mother said. ‘He’s going to live in them.’
    ‘Live where?’ Cora had asked, confused.
    ‘In the sheds!’
    Cora laughed. ‘But there’s no water,’ she said, ‘no heating or light, no electricity. The roofs are coming down.’
    ‘Nevertheless,’ her mother had replied, ‘that’s what he’s going to do.’
    ‘I give him two months,’ her father said, over the top of his newspaper.
    And now the same man was walking towards them. Cora inspected him closely. He was tall and thin, with sandy hair. He was wearing work-clothes – painter’s dungarees, a frayed shirt. He walked up to Cora’s father and held out his hand; she saw her father hesitate for a